What’s New In This Release

Snapshot versions of components – not ready to release a stable version of your component, but still need to publish your component to your PEAR channel for testing? You can now set the project.snapshot property in your build.properties file, and get non-stable packages for distribution.

Code coverage improvements – when you run phing test to run your component’s unit tests and generate the code coverage report, the code coverage report now automatically picks up all of your component’s PHP code, regardless of whether there is a test for it or not.

phpunit.xml support – phix now puts a phpunit.xml file inside your component, which includes all of the settings required to execute your component’s unit tests. This should help TextMate users a lot. This change was requested by attendees at the PHPNW11 conference.

More hooks in build.local.xml – for every target in your component’s build.xml file, you can now add “local.<target>” in build.local.xml, to perform any additional steps that you want to do. This feature was contributed by Martin Wernståhl.

Usability improvements – your component’s build.xml file now traps more errors than before, hopefully making it even easier to learn how to work with components.

How To Upgrade

To upgrade from an earlier release of Phix, please do the following:

sudo pear clear-cache
sudo pear upgrade phix/phix4componentdev

Once you’ve upgraded phix itself, don’t forget to go into each of your components, and run

phix php-library:upgrade .

to upgrade all of the skeleton files (build.xml et al) for your component.

What’s Coming In Phix 0.15

Phix 0.15 is all about making sure that Phix works as well on Windows as it already does on Linux and OSX. The feedback from the ZendCon session (which I was gutted to be unable to attend) was that there isn’t much needed, mostly setup instructions. Once that is done, we’ll continue to support Phix on Windows just as we already do on Linux and OSX.

About The Author

Stuart has been writing PHP applications since 2003, and has been contributing to open-source software since 1994. He was an early writer for php|architect, a co-author of the Official Zend Certification Study Guide for PHP 4, and a regular speaker at conferences and user groups since 2004.
When he's not designing software, Stuart loves to explore the world through a camera lens, spend time with his beloved guitars, and continue his study to T'ai Chi Chu'an (Taijiquan).